Fedora Weekly News Issue 279

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 279[1] for the two weeks ending June 22, 2011. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

In Development announcements, a reminder of end of life for Fedora 13, details on a few outages and infrastructure updates, and details on FESCo and Fedora Board elections. Fedora In The News brings six articles about Fedora 15 and 16 and the Fedora student scholarship program. Quality Assurance reports on the latest Test Day on World IPv6, Security spin testing, and lots of other projects ongoing with Fedora 15 and 16. Security Advisories brings us current with the latest security-related package releases in the last two weeks, and Fedora LATAM is back with a brief tutorial on bash-completion. Enjoy!

An audio version of some issues of FWN - FAWN - are available! You can listen to existing issues[2] on the Internet Archive. If anyone is interested in helping spread the load of FAWN production, please contact us!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page[3]. We welcome reader feedback: news@lists.fedoraproject.org

Reminder: Fedora 13 end of life on 2011-06-24

Fedora 13 will reach end of life on 2011-06-24, and no further updates will be pushed out after that time. Additionally, with the recent release of Fedora 15, no new packages will be added to the Fedora 13 collection.

Please see[2] for more information on upgrading from Fedora 13 to a newer release.

Election Results for FESCo and Fedora Board seats

"I'm happy to announce the results of our recent round of elections for
at-large seats on the Fedora Board and FESCo, and FAmSCo. The results
are as follows:

FESCo

There were five FESCo seats up for election this cycle. A total of
200 ballots were cast in the FESCo election. Each of the eight
candidates could receive up to 1600 votes (200 ballots multiplied by 8
candidates).

The top five candidates were Kevin, Bill, Tomáš, Peter, and Stephen.
Each will server a full two-term position on the Fedora Engineering
Steering committee.

* * * *

Fedora Board

There were three open seats on the Fedora Board this election cycle. A
total of 204 ballots were cast. Due to the system of range voting
that we use in Fedora elections, this means that each of the six
candidates could receive up to 224 votes (204 ballots multiplied by 6
candidates).

IPv6 Test Day tomorrow (World IPv6 Day)

"Sorry for the late notice, though I did trail this a bit last week.
Tomorrow we're having a special Test Day, out of the usual Test Day
cycle (which will open for F16 in a few weeks), for World IPv6 Day.
Special thanks to Linda Wang for getting the ball rolling on this. You
can find the event page at:

with full instructions on testing, including getting IPv6 set up, either
natively or through various tunnel providers. You don't need Rawhide for
testing, Fedora 15 is fine. I know IPv6 is scary to many (including me),
but look at this as an opportunity to help Fedora's IPv6 readiness while
learning about IPv6 from people who know what they're talking about! I
know that's what I'll be doing. The Test Day is in #fedora-test-day on
Freenode, all day long. Fedora QA and Linda's team will be there to help
with testing. Thanks everyone!
--
Adam Williamson, Fedora QA Community Monkey

Fedora Events

The purpose of event is to build a global Fedora events calendar, and to identify responsible Ambassadors for each event. The event page is laid out by quarter and by region. Please maintain the layout, as it is crucial for budget planning.
Events can be added to this page whether or not they have an Ambassador owner. Events without an owner are not eligible for funding, but being listed allows any Ambassador to take ownership of the event and make it eligible for funding.
In plain words, Fedora events are the exclusive and source of marketing, learning and meeting all the fellow community people around you. So, please mark your agenda with the following events to consider attending or volunteering near you!

"Although there is a town in Nevada called Lovelock, I’m assuming the
Fedora Project named the latest version after James Lovelock, inventor
of the microwave and originator of the Gaia Theory of how planet earth
is a self-regulating organism able to adjust various parameters to
maintain some sort of biological and geological balance....Once I had
Fedora installed and running, it became clear that the earlier rumours
of something afoot in Fedora 15 were true. Fedora has a new look and
feel, courtesy of the Gnome 3 interface. Fedora 15 was easy to use,
and apps such as the office productivity easy to install; in fact, I
wrote this column using LibreOffice’s Writer package."

Rahul Sundaram forwarded[1] an article on upcoming Xen integration with the Linux kernel:

"Core to KVM’s rapid success is the fact that it’s included in the
kernel. In contrast, Xen has always worked well on Linux platforms, but
since 2007 users have needed to apply a significant kernel patch and do
some configuration not included in the core Linux distributions to make
it work. That’s a headache and a support issue for OSS vendors and IT
staff. By contrast, since KVM’s inclusion in the kernel and declared
support from the major distributions such as Red Hat and Ubuntu, getting
a KVM environment going is easier and also encouraged by the distributors."

"The Xen community has been trying to get Xen introduced into the Linux
kernel for years, but the need for multiple kernel binaries was always a
sticking point with Linux kernel maintainers. In 2009, Linux creator
Linus Torvalds wrote that "Xen really is horribly badly separated out.
It gets way more incestuous with other systems than it should. It's
entirely possible that this is very fundamental to both
paravirtualization and to hypervisor behavior, but it doesn't matter --
it just means that I can well see that Xen is a f---ing pain to merge."

Fedora 16 with Btrfs as standard file system (The H Online)

Rahul Sundaram forwarded[1] details on a recent FESCo affirmation for Fedora 16 to use Btrfs:

"At its IRC meeting on Wednesday, the Fedora Engineering Steering
Committee (FESCo) resolved to use Btrfs as the standard file system in
Fedora 16 "Verne". Btrfs was called the "Next Generation File System for
Linux" by numerous major kernel developers two years ago and is still
labelled as experimental. For Fedora 16 there will be a "simple switch"
from Ext4 to the new file system; therefore Fedora's installation
program will not force Btrfs' RAID- and LVM-like capabilities onto users."

Review: Red Hat Fedora 15 (Computing UK)

"Version 15 of Red Hat's[2]
community project Linux distribution Fedora showed great stability, and it was simple to add applications onto the platform. We had no problem with hardware drivers and the new GNOME 3 GUI was easy to use, even though initially we did seem to be blundering about. Fedora would suit corporate road warriors who would like a combined Fedora-Windows dual-boot system (in case of OS failure), or anybody interested enough to see how far Linux has advanced compared to Windows and Mac OS X operating systems."

"The Fedora Project[2] has released an update to its flagship Linux-based operating system, Fedora 15, incorporating a
fully revamped desktop environment, new robotics development tools, and an appliance creator for building virtual machines and disk images for desktop and cloud deployment.

Fedora is a widely distributed[3] free and open source desktop
operating system suite that includes a core OS (based on the Linux
kernel) and a comprehensive suite of open source components, including
productivity software and a GNOME graphical user interface. Fedora is
sponsored by open source developer Red Hat[4].

Version 15, which formally launched last week, rolls in a range of major
enhancements for end users, admins, and developers alike."

"RALEIGH, N.C.--The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) sponsored
and community-supported open source collaboration, today announced that
Ricky Elrod is the recipient of the 2011 Fedora Scholarship, a program
now in its fourth year. The Fedora Scholarship program recognizes
college and university-bound students across the globe for their
contributions to free software and the Fedora Project. Elrod has spent
significant time working within Fedora's Infrastructure Team, a group of
volunteers that manage the servers and applications that run Fedora. He
was selected from an impressive applicant pool and plans to continue his
education at the University of Akron this fall and major in Computer
Science*.*

Fedora is built by a worldwide community of people and is inclusive for
anyone to join and contribute across multiple functions from content
writers, designers and marketers to translators, web developers and
system administrators. Fedora and Red Hat are committed to fostering the
talent of young contributors and aim to encourage students to gain
hands-on experience with open source software and lead in the creation
and spread of free code and content.

"We are very pleased to be awarding the Fedora Scholarship to Ricky this
year," said Jared Smith, Fedora Project Leader at Red Hat. "His
contributions to the Fedora Infrastructure Team have made a positive
impact to help everything from our project website and wiki to the
package builder and update manager run smoothly. We thank Ricky for his
numerous contributions and look forward to his continued work with
Fedora as he attends university and pursues his degree."

Fedora Scholarship applicants are evaluated on criteria including the
quality of contributions made to Fedora and other free software
projects, references provided by Fedora community members, the amount of
time the applicant has been contributing to Fedora and the overall
quality of the application. Recipients are awarded a scholarship to be
applied toward tuition for the student's college or university
education. Fedora Scholarship winners also receive funding for travel
and lodging at the Fedora User and Developer Conference (FUDCon) nearest
to their location for each year of the scholarship.

"I would like to say a huge 'thank you' to the Fedora Infrastructure
team and the Fedora Project as a whole, for showing me, and many people
like me, that open source software is easy to contribute to from any
level of experience," said Elrod. "Thank you to all who make Fedora the
great project that it is, and the great project that it will continue to
be.

The 2012 application window will open in fall 2011. For more information, visit [2]."

Test Days

A special Test Day[1] was held on Wednesday 2011-06-08 for World IPv6 Day[2], thanks to Linda Wang. Despite the complexity involved in implementing an IPv6 setup for testing, a good group of testers were able to run through the various tests and identify some bugs which have already received developer attention.

The Fedora 15 Test Day track is now finished, and the main Fedora 16 Test Day track has not yet started. If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 16 cycle, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac[3].

Security spin testing

Athmane Madjoudj announced some testing he had done on the Fedora 15 security spin[1]. Adam Williamson thanked him and asked if he had contacted the security spin authors about it[2], and Athmane replied that he would. Later, Athmane announced that he had added some more tests[3], and Adam suggested writing them up as test cases[4]. Athmane did this[5], and then continued to add more test cases regularly. In the course of this work, Athmane noticed and helped to address some problems with the rendering of tags and templates in the wiki[6][7].

Release criteria revisions

Adam Williamson continued with revisions of the release criteria. He announced that the wording 'release-blocking desktops' to describe the desktops that are capable of blocking release had been generally well received, so he had updated the criteria to use this wording[1].

Installer validation test revisions

Rui He reported that she had refined the various installation source tests that form part of the installation validation matrix by creating some new tests and renaming and adjusting others[1]. James Laska followed up with some questions and comments[2], and Rui He continued with further improvements.

Overly similar application names

Vitezslav Humpa started a discussion and made some proposals around the issue of applications with very similar names and icons in the system menus[1]. This resulted in an active and productive debate across several teams about the best way to move forward in addressing the problem. In the end it was agreed that it would be best and fastest to work on a case-by-case basis through the most commonly-encountered name collisions.

Draft btrfs test case

John Dulaney announced that he had been working on a btrfs test case in advance of Fedora 16, where it is likely to be the default filesystem, and that he had a draft available for review[1]. Rui He, Rahul Sundaram and JB replied with comments and suggestions.

Fedora 15 QA retrospective

James Laska announced that he had completed the Fedora 15 QA retrospective wiki page, and drafted a set of recommendations for review by the group. He asked for feedback on the retrospective and the recommendations[1].

AutoQA

There were two big AutoQA developments since the last newsletter. One was the so-called 'pretty patch', which improved the layout and legibility of AutoQA results, particularly the dependency check test. It was submitted to the mailing list on 2011-06-06[1] by Kamil Paral and pushed on 2011-06-10[2]. The other was a patch from Tim Flink to reduce the volume of messages sent out by AutoQA, notably by not sending emails to maintainers when the tests are entirely successful. This patch was submitted on 2011-06-06[3] and merged on 2011-06-09[4].